Credit Shopping Events (CSE)

Credit Shopping Events (CSE) provide visibility into a merchant's prior loan application activity across the Ocrolus network by grouping related Loan Inquiries into distinct credit-seeking episodes.

Instead of treating every application as a separate signal, CSE help reduce noise from repeated submissions, corrected uploads, broker activity, or multiple uploads tied to the same funding search. This gives underwriters and risk teams a clearer view of how often a merchant has genuinely sought credit.

Loan Inquiry data remains available as the underlying activity used to calculate CSE, application velocity, lender activity, and inquiry history. Use them to incorporate behavioral insights directly into credit decisioning, available in both the Dashboard and through the API.

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Early access

This feature is available through early access. To enable either feature for your organization, contact your Account Manager.

Understanding CSE

A CSE represents one funding search episode by a merchant.

Nearby or related Loan Inquiries are grouped together into a single event to reduce noise from resubmissions, corrected uploads, or broker-driven deal shopping. This helps underwriters understand how many times a merchant has genuinely sought credit, rather than relying only on raw application counts.

A Credit Shopping Event may include:

Key concepts

The following terms explain how Ocrolus Intelligence organizes and surfaces merchant credit activity.

• Loan Inquiry: A Loan Inquiry is a single instance of a merchant's document package, or Book, created on the Ocrolus platform.

  Loan Inquiries are useful for understanding raw application activity, including how many times a merchant has been submitted for review across the network.

• Credit Shopping Event (CSE): A Credit Shopping Event is a deduplicated funding search episode. It groups related Loan Inquiries together to help distinguish true credit-seeking behavior from repeated submissions or operational noise.

• Application Velocity: Application Velocity shows how frequently Loan Inquiries have been submitted for a merchant over time. In the Dashboard, this is shown across defined lookback windows from the Book creation date.

Using Credit Shopping Event for underwriting

Credit Shopping Events help underwriters and risk teams:

• Identify application frequency and recency by understanding how often and how recently a merchant has applied for credit.
• Detect high-velocity borrowing behavior by spotting merchants with many recent applications or repeated funding episodes.
• Assess credit shopping behavior by reviewing how many lenders are associated with a merchant's recent activity.
• Distinguish repeated submissions from true credit-seeking events by comparing raw Loan Inquiries with deduplicated Credit Shopping Events.
• Evaluate merchant history by using the recorded application history as an additional behavioral signal.
• Streamline review workflows by surfacing behavioral context directly in the Dashboard and API.

Frequent or overlapping applications may indicate credit stress, loan stacking risk, or aggressive borrowing behavior. A longer application history with fewer recent Credit Shopping Events may indicate a more established merchant with lower recent credit-seeking intensity.

Credit Shopping Event in the Dashboard

In the Ocrolus Dashboard, Credit Shopping Events appear within the Ocrolus Intelligence section of a Book.

The section provides a summary of the merchant's application history, inquiry and credit shopping event velocities, lender activity, and deduplicated credit-seeking events.

Summary metrics

At the top of the section, the Dashboard displays summary metrics that provide a high-level view of the merchant's borrowing activity.

Use this section to quickly understand the merchant's overall application history, recent activity, and breadth of lender engagement.

Credit Shopping Events and Loan Inquiries velocity

The Loan Inquiries velocity view shows the number of raw Loan Inquiries associated with the merchant across rolling time windows from the Book creation date.

This section can be switched to display Credit Shopping Events instead of Loan Inquiries, allowing users to view deduplicated funding activity across the same time windows.

These counts help underwriters assess how recently and frequently a merchant has appeared across the Ocrolus network, whether viewing raw inquiries or deduplicated Credit Shopping Events.

Credit Shopping Events list

Below the summary metrics, the Dashboard displays the merchant's Credit Shopping Events.

Each event represents a deduplicated funding search episode and includes:

Credit Shopping Events are displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent activity appears first.

Expanding a Credit Shopping Event

Users can expand a Credit Shopping Event to review the lenders and Loan Inquiries associated with that event.

Within an expanded event:

• Inquiries are grouped by lender.
• Each lender group can be expanded to show the underlying Loan Inquiries.
• Each inquiry includes its timestamp.
• Inquiry records are shown in chronological order within each lender group.
• Only one Credit Shopping Event is expanded at a time. Expanding a new event collapses the previously expanded event.

This view helps underwriters understand whether a merchant's recent activity is concentrated with one lender or spread across multiple lenders.

Interpreting Credit Shopping Events

Credit Shopping Events are designed to make inquiry data easier to interpret.

A high number of raw Loan Inquiries may not always mean that a merchant repeatedly sought new credit. Some inquiries may be caused by repeated uploads, corrected submissions, or broker-driven activity connected to the same funding search.

Credit Shopping Events help underwriters focus on the number of distinct credit-seeking episodes rather than only raw application counts.

Consider the following signals during review:

Credit Shopping Events should be reviewed alongside other Ocrolus Intelligence signals, cash flow analytics, bank statement data, and the lender's internal underwriting criteria.

Credit Shopping Event via API

Credit Shopping Event and Loan Inquiry data can be retrieved programmatically through the API for use in automated decisioning systems, underwriting workflows, and downstream risk models.

API outputs are intended to stay consistent with the Dashboard, so the same merchant and Book context should produce the same underlying Loan Inquiry and Credit Shopping Event signals.

For endpoint structure, request parameters, and example responses, see the Credit Shopping Events API documentation.